There are many industries in which it is desirable to track people or objects, for example, vehicles, baggage or documents, in real time. One particular industry is the air travel industry, where it is very desirable for economic and security reasons to be able to track passengers within airports. However, the travel industry generally also has a need for passenger location and tracking systems. Other environments where tracking and location is desirable include casinos, cruise ships, amusement facilities and hospitals. Location, tracking and communication in relation to medical alert systems and security systems is also desirable.
In the case of air travel, it has long been recognised that air travel congestion results in massive revenue loss in airline ground costs through airport terminal delays. One particular area of revenue loss that has not been targeted to date is excessive time spent by passengers in transport terminals.
In particular, recent evidence suggests that airline passengers are becoming increasingly complacent about boarding their aircraft. This is because they know their bags are on board the aircraft and the aircraft cannot depart without them, or without unloading their bags. Unloading bags on a Boeing 747 aircraft, for example, can take up to 60-90 minutes by the time the relevant baggage containers are found and removed. To the airline, this delay results in costing tens of thousands of dollars. There are also flow-on effects of these delays. These effects are significant, involving loss of flight slots, missing connections for passengers, general network disruption, and aircraft crews having to work (and be paid for) overtime.
This problem has not been addressed, and effective methods of reducing the resultant delays have not been identified. Tracking using a transponder which responds to radio frequency signals has been attempted in the past, but has not been suitable for practical implementation and use in large scale environments where there are a large number of individuals or objects that need to be tracked.